Jēkabs Kazaks

Biography

In the autumn of 1915 two Riga students, Jēkabs Kazaks and Romans Suta, left for Penza: the Riga City Art School had closed because of the war, and Purvītis was looking for places for his pupils in Russian schools.

Kazaks was born on 18 February 1895 in Riga, into a poor family: his father, Pēteris, was a yard-keeper, and his mother was called Ede. He struggled to finish his secondary education. At the Kenigs Realschule his drawing teacher was Jūlijs Madernieks, and in 1913 Kazaks graduated. That same year he entered the Riga City Art School under Vilhelms Purvītis; Roberts Tillbergs taught there too. His drawings were first shown in 1914, at a graphics exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Latvian Art.

At the Penza Art School he studied in the figure class and learned etching. He spent about a year and a half there, yet the works of 1916 already show a mature painter. That year he travelled to Moscow, where he looked at paintings by the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists and the Old Masters, at Russian icons and at an exhibition of the Futurists. He went a second time in 1917 and saw Matisse and Picasso; the strongest impression came from André Derain, with his broken, almost Gothic forms. Together with Suta, Roberts Mačernieks and Kārlis Baltgailis he produced a handwritten magazine, “The Truth of Four Men”. Kazaks made a supplement for it called “Smoke”; only two issues appeared. In 1917 he held an exhibition in Penza. Back in 1915 he had worked in the office of the committee for supplying Latvian refugees, and the refugee experience shaped his best subjects: “Refugees” (1917) and a series on the same theme show the everyday life of people who had lost their homes. The paintings of Jāzeps Grosvalds influenced them, but Kazaks added his own intimate sensitivity. It seems to me that this is what sets him apart among Latvian modernists.

In the spring of 1917 he returned to Riga with Suta. In August he enlisted in the 5th Zemgale Regiment, but when the Latvian riflemen left Riga in their retreat, he stayed in the city. In October 1918 he went to Alūksne and worked there as a teacher of drawing and art history. On 30 November he gave a lecture, “On Art”, in which he set out his theoretical views. In the summer of that year, together with Ansis Cīrulis, Jānis Saklis and Jānis Liepiņš, he showed his work in the Zeltiņš bookshop on Terbatas Street in Riga.

In 1919 he came back to Riga and became a member of the Expressionists’ Group, which also included Niklāvs Strunke, Romans Suta, Otto Skulme, Valdemārs Tone and Konrāds Ubāns. The group issued a portfolio of linocuts, “Expressionists”. In 1919 he took part in a retrospective exhibition of Latvian art at the City Art Museum. In 1920 the group became the Riga Artists’ Group, and Kazaks was its theoretician and first chairman; that year he also took part in its first exhibition.

Scholars divide his work into three periods: the influence of Impressionism (1912–1916), monumental, generalised painting with strong expression (1916–1918), and a search for decorative painting (1918–1920). He generalised forms, built combinations of conventional colours and often distorted figures. His compositions show a severity and an almost Cubist geometry. The works of 1918 became more painterly, the brushwork more plastic, and in the last year the colours grew lighter and more resonant. He worked in oil and watercolour and made linocuts, woodcuts and drawings in Indian ink.

Kazaks died in Riga on 30 November 1920, aged twenty-five. He was buried in Torņakalns Cemetery. In 1922 the Riga Artists’ Group held an exhibition of the works he left behind, and in 1995 a memorial exhibition was held in Riga. About forty of his oil paintings and some 150 to 250 watercolours and drawings are held mainly in the Latvian National Museum of Art.